Immigration, Exile and Displacement

As Jim Burden sets down his memories of growing up as a pioneer in Black Hawk, Nebraska, his thoughts keep returning to the immigrant girl he befriended, and what she truly meant to him.

Documenting life before, during, and after crossing the US/Mexico border, these poems explore the emotional impacts of immigration and the ongoing search for belonging.

With a heavenly voice and a hit song, Irish charmer Patrick Murphy has a talent for music and an eye for the ladies. With two women pursuing their quarry in 1950’s New York, a third joins them from Ireland and she always gets what she wants.

After Pearl Harbour, German immigrants and family restaurateurs Nina and Otto Aust are accused by the American authorities of being Nazis. Separated from each other and their teenage and sons, can their bonds of love break the chains of fear and suspicion?

Told through several voices, a family takes a road trip south from New York to Apacheria because the Apaches were “the last of something”. Meanwhile, thousands of children from Central and South America risk their lives to cross the US border. Two journeys. Two different directions. One story of being human in an inhumane world.

An impassioned argument by a young Mexican American woman for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Required reading for anyone keen to understand the struggles illegal immigrants face coming to America and get a perspective from the ‘other side of the fence’.

If home is where the heart is, then maybe "Adios, Happy Homeland!" is home for these bunch of Cuban exile writers. This collection is a critical look at life, and pulls apart and reassembles the myths that have come to define her culture.

We’re taken into a sick man’s fever dream as he waits for a train beneath a strange night sky, into a community of parachute makers facing the end in a windy town that no longer exists, and onto a Cuban beach where the body of a boy last seen on a boat bound for America turns out to be a giant jellyfish. With Adios Happy Homeland!, Menéndez puts a contemporary twist on the troubled history of Cuba and offers a wry and poignant perspective on the conundrum of cultural displacement.

"Leaving Beirut" was said to be "'[o]ne of the most poignant testimonies to the Lebanese civil war" by critics. And this is Mai Ghoussoub's quiet force of a memoir and testimony of the tough times in Lebanon.

Complete with postmodern literary touches, the novel-slash-memoir remembers the war through not just one woman's memories, but with readings in history, newspaper headlines and television reportage as well. And she reflects: who would she have been if she had not witnessed bonds of friendship turn in to animosities, and decent human beings transformed into villains? She remembers the stories of revenge and retaliation she once tried to escape, and finds herself drawn back to them, as events — past or present — in Bosnia, Rwanda or Argentina remind her of the tragedies that shaped her life.

Book of Clouds is a haunting, masterfully wrought debut novel about a young Mexican woman adrift in Berlin, where a string of fateful encounters leads to romance, violence, and revelation.

It's a magical, profound portrait of a city forever in flux, and of the myths we cling to in order to give shape to our lives.